Ngos Have Poverty For Tea
It is strange if not totally mind-numbing that the
very people who talk about human rights have no time to spare a
thought for a poverty alleviation programme as far reaching as
Divi Neguma.
The entire civil society intellectual lobby in this country
has been shedding copious tears latterly about what they refer
to as the undermining of the 13th Amendment to the constitution
by the Divi Neguma Bill.
Constitutions are for constitutional lawyers and political
science boffins.
That none of the tear-jerkers in these intellectual
compartments called ‘civil society think tanks’ have thought
about the human dimension of the Divi Neguma programme is
telling. It is about people who eke out an existence out of
harsh and unyielding territory, in the far reaches of this
country.
The government steps out to lend them a hand and uplift their
lives of long running hardship and privation, and look at the
first people to protest on grounds of constitutional
considerations of an entirely academic nature?
What’s moot here is the extensive public campaign to paint
the Divi Neguma Bill as a piece of legislation that is
objectionable from a legal scholar’s standpoint. This is typical
of NGO humbuggery and insensitivity.
The fact is that Provincial Councils are not empowered to
address poverty alleviation issues in a cohesive and organized
manner. It goes without saying, also, that what one Provincial
Council does for instance by way of possibly successful poverty
alleviation, the other will not or will not be able to mimic.
This is why an all-encompassing national policy on poverty
alleviation is a policy imperative. Social security, be it in
the United States or closer home in India, is not an issue left
to the regional or state administrations alone.
But poverty is not an issue that comes within the ambit of
the beer swilling, sausage chomping, and at the higher level,
the champagne guzzling and cigar chomping non-governmental
coterie. Poverty interests these people only when as Sainath the
explosively insightful Indian journalist says, the subject
becomes so glamorous that everybody comes to ‘poverty seminars’
held in glittering five star facilities, expect abjectly poor
people. ..
It is time for a national consensus on poverty alleviation
with a special accent on the Divi Neguma legislation. The poor
people of this country should be made privy to the plot among
the privileged and the foreign-funded to bury what is after all
their programme, under a heap of constitutional and legal
gobbledygook.
Time and the energy devoted by the civil society lobbies to
show that Divi Neguma undercuts the 13th Amendment to the
constitution consists of a modern day saga of subtle subversion
of what belongs to the poor people of this land - - the salt of
this earth. Not one word was spoken about the good that the Divi
Neguma programme will entail the debt-ridden and the near
bankrupt on the nether edges of our society.
Constitutional law and the details involved therein could be
talked of until the cows come home, but what was missing was a
holistic treatment of the subject under review. Nobody thought
it fit to present a pro and con analysis about how the poor
would fare with and without the Divi Neguma.
That part of the discourse was deliberately shut out from the
public radar. Instead of the rice and pol sambol issues of the
impoverished farmer or handyman, legal minutiae were presented
as the all important factors that stood to destabilize the
nation.
What destabilizes nations in the end, and tears up the social
fabric? What caused two social convulsions - - three really --
in terms of two JVP uprisings and the Northern terrorist
onslaught?
\It was plain and simple bread and dhal issues that left a
vast swathe of our youth at the mercy of the predator
campaigners who wanted to use impressionable youth to ride to
power on their backs.
This is why it’s painful to see the rich, powerful and
well-connected privately funded intellectual lobby in Colombo
opt to block one of the most far reaching poverty alleviation
programmes since independence, with a nod to the leather bound
and gilt-edged law books. |